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Chapter 1 Introduction: Used Books ‘‘Mark my words.’’ So the authors, editors, and printers of English Renaissance texts exhorted their readers; and mark they did, in greater numbers than ever before and more actively, perhaps, than at any time since. Marking was a matter, then as now, of attending to words, listening to their stories, thinking about their arguments, and heeding their lessons . But Renaissance readers also marked texts in the more physical and social senses captured in the phrase ‘‘making one’s mark’’—making books their own by making marks in and around them and by using them for getting on in the world (as well as preparing for the world to come). Indeed, if the date ranges in the Oxford English Dictionary are to be trusted, the mental connotations of the word ‘‘mark’’ follow on from the material and graphic practices it designated: ‘‘To notice or observe’’ comes after ‘‘To put a mark on’’ and ‘‘To record, indicate, inscribe, or portray with a mark, sign, written note, etc.’’ Among the earliest definitions is ‘‘To write a glossarial note or commentary against a word or passage ’’; this meaning is described as ‘‘obsolete’’ now but it was certainly current throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance and is, in fact, the form of marking that will concern me for much of this book.1 How to Read a Book, Circa 1600 Taking note was often a matter of making notes; and Renaissance readers were not only allowed to write notes in and on their books, they were taught to do so in school.2 Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia (quoted in my preface above) describe the active practices used by one of the period’s most advanced scholars in marking the texts he deemed useful. But from John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius; or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), one of the period’s most influential handbooks for teaching young students to read and write, it is clear that the same methods—and the language used to describe them—were introduced at an early age: difficult words, or matters of speciall obseruation, [which] they doe reade in any Author, [should] be marked out; I meane all such words or things as eyther are 4 Marks and Methods hard to them in the learning of them, or which are of some speciall excellency, or vse. . . . For the marking of them, to doe it with little lines vnder them, or aboue them, or against such partes of the word wherein the difficulty lieth, or by some prickes, or whatsoeuer letter or marke may best helpe to cal the knowledge of the thing to remembrance. . . . To doe this, to the end that they may ofttimes reade ouer these, or examine and meditate of them more seriously, vntill that they be as perfect in them, as in any of the rest of their bookes: for hauing these then haue they all.3 When working with Latin texts, Brinsley suggests that beginning readers should take the time to ‘‘note the Declension with a d, ouer the head, and a figure signifying which Declension,’’ ‘‘The Coniugation with a c, and a figure,’’ and so on. ‘‘As they proceede to higher fourmes,’’ Brinsley continues, they should ‘‘marke onely those [things] which haue most difficulty, as Notations, Deriuations, figuratiue Constructions, Tropes, Figures, and the like: and what they feare they cannot remember by a marke, cause them to write those in the Margent in a fine hand, or in some little booke.’’ These blank notebooks could also be used for compiling glossaries of difficult Latin words,4 as well as for digesting sermons .5 The reason for all this methodical marking—what a printed marginal note signals as ‘‘The ends of marking their bookes’’—was that the students ‘‘shall keepe their Authours, which they haue learned’’ (140–41). Such annotations are, then, first and foremost an aid to the memory, which is ‘‘the reason that you shall [find] the choysest bookes of most great learned men, & the most notablest students, all marked through thus’’ (46). But in Brinsley’s teaching, the knowledge stored up is not just to be kept in mind but put into use: ‘‘Legere & non intellegere negligere est. To read and not to vnderstand what wee read, or not to know how to make vse of it, is nothing else but a neglect of all good learning, and a meere abuse of the means & helps to attaine the same’’ (42). As in Whitney’s emblem on...

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